Todd Bruninks asked me to pay attention to gOFFICE, an online office suite which offers Word Processing, Desktop Publishing, Spreadsheets and Presentations (coming soon). Sure, I thought, wondering a bit about the growing inflation of web based office suites. But gOFFICE offers something different, and I like their approach.

As a mission statement, gOFFICE is focused on offering people the ability to create high quality output. They offer dozens of letters, fonts, styles, desktop publishing practices, stationary, etc. Since most people get ugly when they try to get creative (including me), gOFFICE offer a lot of samples and advice you can start with, harness your creativity and route it in a stylish direction.

Their choice of output is a primary reason for why their offering stands out. Documents are saved as PDFs. I tried it and it worked like a charm. You can also choose to transform the document to HTML format, but the original file will still be saved as PDF. This makes gOFFICE the perfect choice for writing formal letters, invitations, business cards, brochures, etc. - A space not well covered by the other online word processors, at least not the ones I am aware of.

When it comes to corporate culture, the folks at gOFFICE are real people that speak real English. They don’t over wrap their goods with marketing bla bla and they don’t overcomplicate things technically. On the other hand, they do provide “dos” and “do nots” in a language an everyday user can understand. For example, to the question “What can I do with gOFFICE?” they respond with:

Got it at first attempt and also learned something new! Thank you!

It’s not that gOFFICE is free of problems. Their user experience is not flawless. They document editting flow is not always straight forward and it takes you time to learn what you can and cannot do with the product. The website is also not perfectly knotted. I got lost a few times trying to navigate to a specific page I was at before. But that’s relatively minor. The major problem I see is with the fact gOFFICE may have stepped into the “Must copy MS Office” trap. Their Spreadsheet application is not impressive to say the least. As a matter of fact, it’s not useful. I don’t really understand why they chose to offer it as it only dilutes their unique value. Their online presentation application is not available yet. I definitely hope it won’t just be another slow and limited version of Powerpoint.

Come to think of it, if the folks at gOFFICE are able to apply their word processing philosophy onto online presentations, they may actually come up with something unique and cool. I will definitely come back and check it out and I encourage you to do that as well.

gOFFICE are San Francisco based. According to the website, they are a bootstrapped, 15 employee operation. Their service is currently free and in the future they look to generate revenue from advertizing.